Director’s usually have the prerogative to write a note to be included in the program. There are also artistic director’s notes, choreographer’s notes, conductor’s notes, and curators wax eloquent in their catalogues and on the plates that accompany the art.

We have so much to say about the art, so much we wanted to say, so much that lurks behind it, that we fear the audience will not get if they only experience the piece. We trust the work, but we want people to experience even a bit of that more that has dogged us through every day of the struggle to produce it—the historical fact, the interpretive framework, the glimmer of utopia in an early rehearsal moment. And so, we info dump in programs and on walls, and very few of our patrons read these pathetic expressions of passion.

As I wrote one such note today, it occurred to me that not only do very few of the audience members actually read the paper in front of them, once that performance/exhibit closes, they are never read again. So much lost!

And sometimes, I just don’t want to lose beautiful trinkets.

So, here is my most recent note, because most of you will never see the production it refers to or sit even once in the theatre in which I spend so many hours of my life. It expresses only a sliver of the passion that keeps me teaching and creating with very young artists. If you are local and this note “piques” your curiosity, you can get tickets here.

Hold on to your Regency-era hats, folks, it’s going to be a wild romp this evening—and indeed, all season! Kate Hamill’s rollicking adaptation of Jane Austen’s beloved classic takes you into a semblance of its historic world. But I promise you will see that supposedly “proper” time and these well-known characters anew, after all of the dancing, the costume changes, the parlor games, and the rapid transitions from place to place.

The historic Annie Russell Theatre, this little jewel box of a play-space, is thrilled to have welcomed back its own alumnae, Peg O’Keef to lead our fearless actors as they transport us across Austen’s landscape. Alongside choreographer Robin Gerchman she has led our students to confidently tip the Regency era on its side and to look at it slightly askew.

Our season is one of adaptations—we just saw Homer’s Odyssey as reimagined in Bike America. Everybody adapts the medieval morality play Everyman; and the musical of Carrie will show us an entirely new side of the horror novel-turned-film classic.  Scholar Linda Hutcheon tells us that adaptions are so popular because they give us “the comfort of ritual combined with piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure.”  Coming to the Annie, show after show, is also a comfortable ritual, and one that also yields piquant surprises—new student actors every season and strange new plays and new techniques. Framing it all is our mutual recognition of the deep value of the Annie Russell Theatre as central Florida’s oldest continuously operating theatre and as a place of thousands of remembrances for its students, alums, and patrons. Thank you for adapting with us through these wild times. Let’s dance through a few decades more together!